Sonnet

Change is the only constant.
The only constant is change.
The only constant is change.
Change is the only constant.
Only change is a constant.
The constant is only change.
The constant is only change.
Only change is a constant.
Could repetition be a constant?
Could a constant be repetition?
A constant: repetition. Could it be?
Could repetition be a constant?
This constant change by repetition,
Can you sense it or is it just me?

Philip Glass (January 31, 1937)

Philip Glass - cut from the cover of
his album music in twelve parts 

Your name lacks an extra l, an extra p,

and, at the end, probably multiple e’s, like this:

Phillippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Glass I would leave unchanged.

For who better than you understands optics,

in the sense of how to look at things?

Who better breaks boundaries,
like the one of music becoming poetry,
memory, moments we never ever lived?

Glass breaks.

Compositor, they say?

Translator! Sound-mapper!

Dream-inducer! Soul-scavenger!

Minimalist? You, who maximize

the sensitivity of our ear-drums?

Maximalist! Fulfillist!

Extra Perception, extra Levity.
One exact month after each New Year's eve,
we should celebrate a New Ear's eve.

Multiplelist.

Hence the extra l, the extra p,

those many e’s, these ecstatic a’s.



.

Dormant

A creature of sleep, embracer of pillows,
tends to float away in the everyday foam,
to yawn through petty problems, and 
to close its eyelids in the sofa of peace.

Hibernation is its default stance
until Spring, blooming, returns.

Then it notices its Winter-long hunger,
its unwashed fur.

Then, oxygen ostracises the said yawn, 
cascades of blood flood the brain,
ears become sensitive to speech,
and the said unwashed fur begins to reek.

It's then time to repair its cave,
to absorb what's new, what changed,
and to gather sleep-inducing food.

At a Glance

I
The opposite of Hatred was never Love.
Empathy.
And Indifference's the neutral stance.

II
There's no moral high ground here from where to lecture;
I too shouted hatefully,
in indifference mumbled,
and empathy silenced me. 

III
Megaphone.
Conversation.
Listening.

IV
And every stage in between.

Those Freckled Skies

Freckles are my punctuation of choice for a female skin. They make men look girlish yet girls look divine.

They've a frailty akin to wearing one’s soul out: For each sin, the blemish is eternally cast.

Divine as a constellation of impossibly far suns which rays are too strong for too fair a skin.

Freckles are a mapped universe, a maze on a milky celestial body.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Open letter to the next armed mass murderer

My dear fellow human being,

For various reasons and lack of, which I strongly believe are not entirely your fault, you came to a point where you want to take your life but also want to take some others' lives with you for the ride. 

That is all very well, but spare me a bit of your attention and I promise you you won't regret it. 

You have a lethal gun or more and easy access, also, to ammo. So going down to a random place such as a school, or a church, where people are most likely unarmed or have extreme difficulties to thwart your plans, namely by being unable to fight you off, is, and you'll agree, quite the coward act. Do you want your last action on Earth to be just that? A last cowardly and attention seeking goodbye? Besides, shootings in schools and similar pacific locations are so common place that you would be only one more unimaginative armed mass murderer.

Now, I'm your friend even though we might not ever meet, and I think you deserve better than that. 

Imagine the challenge of storming into a NRA championship and trying out your skills with people who could fight back?  You'd have others helping you with the firecrackers and fireworks for free! Wouldn't that be less lonely a farewell party? Remember, the better armed you are the more memorable you can make that occasion. And those who would march with you to the afterlife would be fellow gun wielders and most likely as paranoid as you. So much more to talk about for eternity...  

Instead, if you want to be sure you take some friends with you, then your venue of choice should be a NRA meeting. The seconds it will take for any participant to be able to fire back at you are enough to take down a few of them. And one last idea: don't the organizers on the meeting stand seem like sitting ducks or common head and torso targets? A chance to honey your skills and be remembered for that. 

As I said, I'm your friend and thus need to tell you the whole truth. My pitch above has the goal of changing some people's views on gun control after going through a strong emotional process, such as your farewell party would be. That's because logical arguments don't seem to be as effective. Put simply, emotion trumps logic all the time. And you'd be the one who left us but made a real change.

Yours truly,

Emo Trumps 

Cruel Love Duel

   How many masks wear we, and undermasks, 
   Upon our countenance of soul, and when, 
   If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, 
   Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? 

in Fernando Pessoa's Sonnet VIII, 35 English Sonnets


Though Pessoa took off every mask
And found but more masking of the soul,
He probably forgot one item in such task:
A Dorian mirror that we must face
Naked and unsure,
Vulnerable as the clinical eyes of Love
Reveal the masks and the masquerade
Our lifes have been.

Then our biological self kicks in:
We either freeze, pretend death, 
And believe in rebirth,
Or we flee the scene,
Or fight against the image obscene. 

Is Life Short?

Salvador Dalí's "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory"

It’s almost daily that we hear someone—including ourselves—saying something similar to “Life is short.” And it is. Or is it not? Perhaps it’s both at the same time.

Let's imagine we're thirty years old and that we have the ability to remember each passing second of our lives in between ages five and twenty-five. By the time we'd finish recollecting all those moments, we’d be fifty years old (30+20): That is, twenty years late for dinner. We'd probably also be very angry at the enormous waste of time devoted to thinking about our past.

Luckily and instead, our brains pick up just a few highlights out of all the time we lived, and present them to our conscious self as the past. That extremely edited version of our lives is much less time consuming. No wonder then that it seems to us that time passed so fast, and that “Life is short” is such an adequate phrase for what we've just experienced brain-wise.

It’s a tradeoff in the end. Life seems to be shorter than it really was, time seems to have passed faster than it actually did, yet and thanks to that trait we can stop from time to time and evoke our past without ageing too much in that very process.

Thank you, brain! You dearest traitor...

Rodin's Riders

Auguste Rodin's "Centaur"

To ride with and be ridden simultaneously;
pure, coeval, ride and rider:
the very stuff of synchronicity.  

Abandoning self-control, sweaty, 
animal and anima together, 
the longer they trot the more
their minds bloom away disarmingly, 

Then they gallop:

road, dirt;
orchards, colours;
stones, moons;
town, church;
hilltop, silence;
beach, breeze;

Halt! A break: 

a verdant picnic ensues, new smells,
sight scanning the surroundings,
a radar which will bleep only once 
to tell love to home in on the lover
thus beginning their face à face,
coeur à coeur: il faut courir.  

Newark

for Jennifer


In Newark, a bird landed,
of skies weary, merry its eyes.

An entire continent of humanity
had been under its wings,
incontinent prattle by its side.

Yet, when we move up close,
birds that so gracefully soared
are the embodiment of anxiety.

Mostly so in Spring, nesting,
collecting twig and straw
out of the best tree and field
that while soaring they saw.

Drinking from a nearby pond,
they cool down for a new round
until down the sun goes,
their chirp piercing the dusk
before the tranquil night.

Half the work being done,
soon our bird will fully rest
its bright plumage and breast
amidst the fruit of its toil.

And then, seen from the soil,
secure, a work of much art,
its nest will become a new ark.

To choose is to eliminate

“No no no no no no no no no no no no,” a cute toddler sang without a hint of punctuation. “She’s in love with the word ‘no’,” her grandmother explained.

Perhaps there is simply too much of everything around us, and we have to choose. Or the choice is not even solely dependent on our will. And any choice is a process of elimination of everything else. Or are there superwomen and supermen, these Übermenschen, who can take it all in? Human blackholes, what would become of the information compactly stored within them? Would it be reused in dreams, or lost in faulty synapsing? Would it remerge unexpectedly, uncalled for, to help in the creation of a new work of art? 

“No no no no no no no.”

“Thou shalt not pass!”

The freedom to punch

Pope Francis in an airplane, and Dr. Gasbarri laughing at the prospect of being punched on the face by the former... because he's too weak by now?

«It's true that we can't react violently, but, for example if Dr. Gasbarri here, a great friend of mine, says a curse word against my mother, then a punch awaits him. It’s normal… It’s normal… One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun of faith. There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity ... In freedom of expression there are limits.»

Those were the heightened, heavenly words of Pope Francis, specially so for he proffered them while flying in an airplane. Most likely even God Herself overheard him—he was that close to Her. 

Landing a fist on a friend’s face because the latter said something offensive about our mother is not the same as killing a dozen persons because our deceased and supposed Father was offended. So Francis’ argument seems not to take off right from the beginning.

But let’s imagine, for two minutes or a couple of thousand of years, that Francis' argument was valid, which is something we usually have to do anyway when the likes of Popes are talking. 

My father, who, like Muḥammad, is deceased, was a huge defender of the freedom of speech and of respect towards our intellectual opponents’ viewpoints. He even had the nerve to tell his progeny that he wasn't religious, but if any one of us five wanted to be baptized and follow a creed that he would hold nothing against us. 

Setting up limits to “freedom of expression,” as Pope Francis wishes, is no easy task. For instance, who would set those limits? And why those persons and not others?  And what about defining the limits themselves? Is the limit set to when someone is offended or feel that their beliefs are being made fun of? We’re always offending someone: reading the comments that Internet trolls leave on almost every website might help you reach that conclusion. So the complexity of setting any kind of limits to the freedom of speech is huge not to say insurmountable.  And what could the solution to it be? We can always try not to offend people, or accept the fact that our beliefs (and not only) will be offended, as that’s the way of the world, never forgetting that our beliefs are not us, and that beliefs can very well change. 

What I think is that Pope Francis, unless he apologizes for having said that there are limits, offended my father by not respecting his idea of no limits to the freedom of speech, and insulted my belief that religion—like any thing else, I repeat, like any thing else—has no dignity attached to it per se unless demonstrated, item by item. Francis also offended God for She's been thought to be a male for far too long.

And therefore, Pope Francis, according to his own reasoning, should be the first one to admit that I have the natural right to punch him in on the face. As I'm kind, I'll be happy if he just offers me one cheek to slap. Only one.  Only once.

Intimacy - a maturing tendril

for Jennifer


Intimacy is time plus its tempo entwined,
rooted deeply into a soil as black as fertile, 
under which water rushes—

mineral urges—and undermines
all that is past, and turns it into a paste 
by the time and tempo intimacy's vivified.    






_______

photo by backyardnature.com

The New Pantheon – The God of Economy

Now, this is a whimsical god if I ever saw one. Even the god of economy’s most devoted worshipers can by him be fooled and left stranded.

The realm of this god is vast, ranging from our vocal instruments—which also serve for us to eat, taste, kiss, and breathe, for instance—to a cleaning station where large fish go to have smaller fish or even shrimps remove their parasites.  Oh, yes: the god of economy doesn't care about humans alone, just as the goddess of sex doesn't, and that’s why they are true gods.

But this god is also deceptive. And he might be the one responsible for mirages. As one example, he’ll lure us into cheating on a school exam in order to attain our goal. Yet what happens is that the way to that goal, the process, is the one which will enrich us, and not the end result. So while our goal is achieved we didn't improve our condition at all. And that’s when you can hear the god of economy laugh a good laugh. He does love irony.

This new god's name, if you want to pray to him or ward him off, is Mireco.

As I’m writing this piece under the auspices of Mireco, I must stop here. You go and figure out the remainder of his characteristics.

_______

photo by Public Library of Science, depicting a reef manta ray at a cleaning station, maintaining a near stationary position atop a coral patch for several minutes while being cleaned by cleaner fishes

Faith, a puzzle out of bonds

The most important part
was left out of the scene;
the source of light that got in
was not part of the art,
each thought was locked within
each drawer, each head 
thus left alone to devise
what was being unseen.




______

watercolour by Jennifer Allison
One Street Shy

The New Pantheon - The Goddess of Sex

Recently I started playing a game called Words With Friends. That’s an app version of Scrabble, more addictive probably because your opponents can play with you any time, without the constraints of presence and... well... time. 

Quite an innocent thing, isn't it? 

Checking out the various menus of my new app I came across one named Community Match... And it turns out that the community is populated by photos, many of young women's selfies, some in bikini, some in underwear, and that you can search "community members" who are near you, and also based on their gender. So there you go: Tinder for Scrabblers.  

Gods won't disappear as long as there's a human being alive... who has the belief genes in him. So I want new gods. The old ones smell rotten no matter how you try to perfume them. And too many times the rottenness is that of human flesh.

Those apps prove once again the existence of probably the most important god for us: sex. Besides being one of the most pleasurable things you can do on earth, we all are the byproduct of sex, or of sexual fluids, for those who were conceived in vitro. Most of the things we deal with in everyday life can be traced back to the goddess of sex.

The second most difficult task after identifying a deity is naming it. In the western world tradition, we've the Greek (and Roman) Eros (Cupid), and Venus (Aphrodite). But they too smell of rotten flesh from having been gravely wounded by psychology or commerce, while Reproduction is too sterile a name for a god, no matter how new that god might be.

So here's my best shot for the time being: Penina.

Okay, okay! Vagenis then.

As if it mattered which came first.

The decline of TV

The Radio overshadowed the Minstrel,
TV did it to the Radio,
The Internet is doing it to all the Media;
Where's the shadow that Minstrels hide?  

Morning Dew

for Jennifer


Days of rain on her roof
soaked her attic’s woodwork 
under which, in tin trunks kept,
frailly locked by cobwebs and dust,
folded her whole being lays.

Water rushed out 
of pipes by the windows,
dormant seeds, down below,
drank it and sprouted,
and her garden flourished, 
as gardens do on days of rain.

Bone and Marrow

I should have explained my love for bones sooner:
How can we not love a bone? 
The last vestige of us and ours to be gone,
or as vulgar as a bloody boner?

Before we lie under a barrow,
there's only one thing here to be sorrow:
to be gone and all but bone tomorrow
without tasting some marrow.

Big Brother

Thomas Jefferson thought that, "Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching," gained a new meaning, with Big Brother contours, according to this article: How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person. Better or more likely to follow a set of rules? Don't dictators like to spread statues and photos of themselves around their dominions?



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Photo by António Dinis Lopes